whelp. if you have a php script that can do the diff like that python script does, we'll be happy to look at it..

honestly we thru the diff routine in on a whim, so yes it bothers me that it requires python but its more likey I'd just dump that feature than try to build it by hand. we've built diff engines by hand before and it sucks.

i think we're also going to start taking a gradated install approach. so the new install script we're working on now will do some checks and give you some awareness as to what's critical to run c5 (hey, no database!) and what would make it run better (flash uploader won't work, diff engine wont work, etc)

Yes... Easy to understand ;-) I tried to build a diff engine in c a long time ago.

Would be cool though if the feature wouldn't be visible when it doesn't work..

I'll keep my eyes open, someone might build a php diff engine someday ;-)

http://www.phpclasses.org/browse/package/2302.html

it contains a lass that gets started by
$fDiff = new fileDiff($file1,$file2,$file1AlternateName2Display,$file2AlternateName2Display);
$fDiff->foundDiff(); // to show
//OR:
$ret = $fDiff->foundDiff(true); // to return it only.

does PHP syntax hilight on the fly. not hard to remove. seems pretty usefull.

Unfortunately, that class, like so many others, is not HTML based. It's a pure line by line diff engine. What's great about htmldiff.py (even though it doesn't always work perfectly and, obviously, is python) is that it is frequently a decent approximation of HTML-based differences...

Meaning you'll see highlighted images when they are new, adding bold tags and things will count as new items but the engines know how to parse them, etc...